Crossing Boundaries for Inbound Call Center

Speed of deployment, business continuity, the ability to future-proof infrastructure, easy to predict payments, and many more are just some of the many benefits for companies that cloud communications may give. A lot of companies tend to rely unto the cloud for them to cost-effectively access a lot of enhanced capabilities and at the same time removing the difficulty of managing and deploying establishment-based solutions. Cloud-based inbound contact centers offer a lot of benefits, specially the ease of removing or putting more agents as what is needed based on the different seasonal traffic, ease of deploying those at-home agents, and ease of putting multichannel services.

Companies that may have set up hosted inbound call center solutions are getting additional benefits they may not have expected – this is the breaking down of boundaries. Intricacy and cost can start to have a major impact on efficiency once a call center expands from a single location. While most believe that a single call center, regardless of how big it is, runs much more flawlessly from a staffing point of view than multiple call centers. Walls is the second boundary. Not really the physical type of wall, but the walls that the are put in between the agents in the call center and the topic expertise they need to help them in resolving customer concerns. These boundaries will exist whether the company has multiple locations or one singe huge call center.

For most inbound call centers, giving a “single face to the customer” is really that important to give the best customer experience as possible. While customers have a lot of options to select from now as what it was like before in how they want to interact (email, call and chat) it becomes even more intuitive to address a huge single pool of customer representatives to handle the inbound request for service. Smaller groups of customer representatives deployed all around the globe become exponentially hard to manage with each new way of contact that the customers are forcing on the inbound call center in trying to achieve better efficiency.

When you maybe think of a typical inbound call center, one thing that comes into mind is a large, non-descript area filled with a lot of customer representatives sitting in their cubicles looking frustrated while wearing their headsets. Although this scene is still a bit true, some things are already starting to change.

From providing excellent customer service that lead to long-term customer loyalty, inbound call centers have transformed from specialized isolated cost centers to revenue centers, by now also providing the chance to cross-sell and upsell.